


Recon

by Go0se



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: (god I hope that's not a euphemism), Awkward Conversations, Awkwardness, Canon Compliant, F/M, Gap Filler, Gen, Hot Chocolate, Not A Fix-It, Not Beta Read, Power of Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-15
Updated: 2013-10-15
Packaged: 2017-12-29 11:52:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1005101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Go0se/pseuds/Go0se
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Alex showed up at the hotel Jay was staying at about a month after Jay woke up there it makes about as much sense as anything else in his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Recon

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for MH Fic Week '13 on Tumblr, which if you want to look up has the tag 'mhficweek13' and was cool. This a fill of a prompt I got from tumblr user stuck-in-a-loop-of-unhappiness (who is also cool): "During the hotel entries Alex finds Jay intending to kill him, but after realizing Jay’s amnesia he changes his mind". 
> 
> //

  
**Recon**  
  
  
Car; cell phone; wallet; laptop; camera; clothes; flashlight; ibuprofen he didn’t remember buying; key he didn’t remember having; chest camera he didn’t remember getting; and a girl the next room over from him who said his name sounds familiar. It’s not much to go on, and it’s absolutely all Jay has to tell him where or how the last seven months of his life have gone.  
When Alex showed up at the hotel Jay’s staying at about a month after Jay woke up there it makes about as much sense as anything else _.  
_

Jay had gone out for a grocery run late in the afternoon and then checked out a local library he’d come across to try and figure out more about the place he’d found himself. By the time he pulled back up to the hotel which was his temporary home base there was barely any light left in the sky.  
Jay parked his car in the second row up from the hotel’s sidewalk. He picked up the groceries in one hand and his handheld camera in the other. He stepped out into the parking lot, taking a quick pan of it with his handheld just in case, staying behind the relative protection of his open car door.  
Alex was standing in the shadow of one of the columns at the back door of the hotel, staring down at his phone. Both the way he was hunched over and his puffy blue jacket made him look like a penguin.  
  
The last time Jay had seen him was on a tape that’d been sent to Jay’s hotel room from an unknown address. This was the person Jay had been looking for for years, the reason he’d gotten into all of this. It took a second for Jay to find his voice. “Alex?”  
  
Alex looked up. For a second they only stared at each other. Then Alex put his phone into his pocket and crossed the blacktop toward Jay.

Jay quickly dropped his groceries back into his front seat and got out from behind the door, meeting Alex in front of his car; seeing Alex’s outstretched arm, without thinking, he threw his arm (that wasn’t holding the camera) out too and enfolded his friend in a hug.  
Alex’s arm bent around Jay’s shoulder and thumped him on the back loosely, like it was just moving from the momentum of Alex’s quick walk up there. Alex himself absolutely froze.  
Jay wasn’t doing much better. Having someone so close to him felt weird— how long has it been since anyone had hugged him? Or been nearer to him than required to like, hand him back change? He patted the other man’s back twice and then disengaged.  
Alex quickly stepped away from him, his face twisted up. He looked as unsettled as Jay felt.  
 _Alex,_ Jay thought, _good God_. He took a deep breath to stop himself shaking. “Alex, what the hell. What’re you doing here? What happened?”  
“What do you mean?” His voice sounded the same as it ever had on the tapes, raspy and sharp.  
“What do I— what _happened,_ ” Jay repeated, gesturing. “Where have you been? What’s been going on?! Were you the one who— sent me that tape in April?”  
Alex was staring at him. “What’ve you been doing for the last few months, Jay?”  
  
“I’ve—” Jay stopped, suddenly feeling the dark close in around his head.  He spun on his heel, bringing up his camera to his face again. There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary he could see behind him, though, and the only thing in front of him was Alex’s blank face. Still. “I don’t think we should be having this conversation out in the open like this,” he said, stepping back to his car, which he’d left open. He barely had the presence of mind to grab the grocery bag as well as his keys from the seat.  
“It’s a parking lot,” Alex said in a deadpan.  
“Well it’s still outside.” Jay straightened up, shut the car door, locked it and stuck his keys in his pocket. He focused the camera on Alex again. “Look, I have a room booked for a while, let’s just go in alright? It’s better than just… standing out here.”  
Alex was hesitating. He’d stuck his hand in one of his jacket pockets once he’d let go of Jay’s hug and hadn’t moved it since. His eyes went from Jay’s pocket to the door of Jay’s car to something in the air above Jay’s head.  
When Jay turned around again to look there wasn’t anything there. He lingered the camera on the dark parking lot and leafless treeline in the distance anyway, zooming in on some likely spots. The last of the sun was fading, making the trees look even more skeletal.  
“Fine,” Alex said from behind him. “Fine, let’s go in.”  
  
*  
  
Alex stood silently in the hallway as Jay juggled his camera and grocery bags and key card until Jay finally got the door open. He also stood silently in the corner of the room by the diplated hotel armchair and the window as Jay went through what had become his return-to-room ritual of flipping lights on, putting the camera on the top of the dresser with its lens facing out into the room, then looking through everything for his cell phone, wallet, laptop, clothes, flashlight, ibuprofen, strange key, chest camera. (Thankfully for Jay they were all in the same place he left them that morning. He exhaled, some of his paranoia easing.) When Jay briefly pressed his hand to the wall that his room shared with the next room over, Alex asked, “Why are you doing that?”  
Jay dropped his hand and shrugged. “There’s this girl over there, Jessica,” he said. “We were talking a few days ago and she said that my name sounded familiar. I just… do that, to remind myself that she’s there, I guess.” He paused, looking over at his friend. “Uh. Something wrong?”  
Alex had tensed up. “What’d you talk about?”  
“Nothing really, just our names. I haven’t seen her a whole lot—”  
“Well is she there now?”  
“I have no idea,” Jay replied quickly, still standing by the wall. Suddenly it seemed good to keep as much distance between him and Alex as possible. He wondered, with a stab of worry, if he had locked the hotel room door behind them when he’d came in. “Why are you so interested in her?”  
“I just wanted to know—”  
“It’s not really any of your business who I talk to,” Jay said. He started to take a step back toward the door.  
“Well _I’ve_ been trying to call you for months and no answer, so, I thought I’d ask what was so important they’d captured absolutely all your attention,” Alex snapped.  
  
Wait.  
“What?”  
  
“I’ve been trying to call you for months and I haven’t gotten an answer,” Alex repeated slowly like it was the words themselves and not what they meant that Jay had had a problem understanding. Alex’s hands were in his jacket pockets again and he was looking at the dresser top instead of at Jay. Glaring at, really. “After I sent you that tape I thought you would get the hint that I needed your help. So I’ve been trying to reach you but you haven’t picked up.”  
“It’s not that I haven’t picked up, it’s—” Jay protested and then stopped himself.  
Did he want to tell Alex this? After all, he’d just shown up out of the night like a Disney villain. The fact that Alex had apparently been… trying to get Jay’s help, and Jay hadn’t been able to give it, that didn’t necessarily mean anything. He could’ve ignored Alex’s calls for any reason. (And, part of his brain said, maybe Alex wasn’t even telling the truth. Jay’s phone had been wiped down the operating system when whatever had happened to him happened; he had no logical way of knowing if he’d actually gotten calls from Alex since April. Jay didn’t like the thought of it, but there it was.)  
Alex was staring at him again. “It’s what, Jay?”

Jay didn’t have anyone else to tell. And Alex could help him with all this, couldn’t he? He’d been dealing with it longer than Jay. Maybe something like this had happened to him, too. (‘ _Everyone is gone_ ’.) “I can’t remember,” he admitted. When the silence stretched out, he added, stuttering only a couple times, “Anything. For the last, few months. I woke up in November and I didn’t know where I was or how I got here.”  
Alex kept staring at him for a couple of seconds, looking like he wanted to say something. Then he just looked away again. He’d taken his hand out of his pockets and was studying the dresser again. “Huh,” he said.  
“Yeah. So,” Jay said uncomfortably. In the close light of the dresser lamp he could see a large bruise on Alex’s cheekbone. When had that happened? Could Jay have helped with it if he’d been there?  
  
Then he thought of something and frowned. “You were the one who sent me that tape back in April?”  
"Yeah," Alex said somewhat distractedly. He was staring with some kind of nervous apprehension at the chest camera which Jay had put on the dressser, and now actually had his hand on it like he was planning to try and grab it and make a run for it.  
“Well… what was that tape about?” He thought for a second. “Amy? Is she… gone?”  
Alex stilled.  
That would mean yes. “Uh.” Jay shifted nervously. _Shit._ “Do you have any clues, or anything?”  
“No,” his friend said. “I’ve been looking for her pretty much ever since I sent that to you.”  
"And… nothing?"  
Alex shook his head. “I woke up in my own apartment after it happened. With the camera beside me. I don’t remember what… happened.”  
"So the place in the tape—"  
"Amy’s," he answered. His eyes flicked to the wall separating Jay’s room from Jessica’s and then back to Jay. "I was just visiting."  
"Oh. Have you tried looking up missing person’s?"  
"Of course I looked her up," Alex snapped. He dropped the chest camera back onto the dresser and glared at Jay for a second before turning sharply on his heel and going to look out the half-uncurtained window. "And I called her roommate but there wasn’t an answer, and I called her parents to ask if she’d run to their place or something, but they have no idea; by the time I woke up it’d already been two days and they hadn’t heard anything from her."  
And it had been months now, Jay thought. “They must be worried sick.” He tried not to think about his own parents— or Alex’s parents, for that matter.  
"Yeah," Alex replied. He still didn’t turn away from the window.

  
The atmosphere in the room was now sufficiently awkward to make Jay physically uncomfortable standing there. At least he didn’t feel like he had to be mapping all of the exits anymore. Still, he cast around for something to say or do that would make him not mentally count off the seconds it had been totally silent in the room. He could turn on the TV—- but he’d watched a lot of TV recently, it was starting to lose its shine for him. And Alex looked like he might react badly to sudden noises.  
Jay suddenly wondered what his mom would say if she heard he’d that he had invited a friend into his house (not quite but good enough for now) and not offered them something to drink. He looked at the little continental tray the hotel staff had put in all the rooms with it’s packets of coffee and hot chocolate and the microwave in the corner— and the mini-fridge his room had tucked away under the microwave, where he’d meant to store the milk he’d bought that day before being distracted. “Do you want some cocoa?” He blurted.  
  
Jay was expecting another Disbelieving And Judgmental Stare from his friend. He was sure that Alex was probably giving the window the full blast of one; but, to his surprise, his friend didn’t even turn around.  
If anything at all, he seemed to deflate, very slightly. “… yeah,” he said again, but in a less sharp tone than before.  
  
It took Jay a little while to set about putting away his meager grocery selections, unwrap the hotel-provided clear plastic glasses and make the cocoa. Pretty much the whole time he was conscious of Alex standing unmoving at the window— he went by himself a couple times, tense with fear, but there was nothing there. Jay put his palm on the camera lightly, like a touchstone, every time he went past anyway. Eventually two moderately warm cups of hot chocolate were done, and he put them on the little end table that was between the bed and the armchair (that had seen better days) before clearing his throat.  
Alex looked over his shoulder at him, tugged the curtain over the rest of the window and then came to sit down in the chair. He took the cup gingerly even though it really wasn’t that hot and the worst that could happen was him spilling it and adding another stain to the dark, scrubby room carpet’s probably already impressive collection.  
(Due to the darkness and scrubbiness of the carpet it was hard to tell, but Jay was reasonably sure there were some there.)  
Alex took a sip, nodded at the glass in a unconscious gesture and then set it back down on the end table. He had to stretch his arm to reach it.  
  
After a second of silence where Jay drank, Alex said, “I have a picture of her.”  
Jay looked up. “Okay?”  
Alex was already taking something out of the (apparent) front inside pocket of his jacket. Removing a small square he shrugged the jacket off; it hit the ground with a dull thud and then slowly deflated. He unfolded the square with quick practiced movements and then turned it around toward Jay. He held onto it delicately, like it was something precious.  
It was a 5” by 7” on photographic paper, lightly creased; a head shot of a girl who, being thin and white and blonde, looked approximately like the girl who’d been holding the camera in the tapes that was one of the last thing’s Jay remembered clearly before the hotel. Her smile was the same.  
And she’d been missing for months, Jay thought, and felt kind of sick. He didn’t reach out for it. It seemed like something Alex would get angry over. “What was happening? In the picture, I mean. It looks like she’s at a party, or something,” he tried instead. Even with the short terse answers this is the most him and Alex have talked in… years.  
Alex shrugged, turning the picture around again to look at it. “We were at a party,” he said. “I think a new years one, maybe? We’d been together for a while…” He trailed off.  
  
The moment stretched. Jay drank some more hot chocolate, focusing on his glass and the weird bubbly feeling of the foam part of the drink on his top lip.  
“I didn’t mean for it to happen.” Alex’s voice was quiet but in the quiet room it seemed loud. His face was twisted up again.  
Jay wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and put the cup back on the end-table. “You mean… Amy in particular, or… everything?”  
“Of course Amy,” Alex snapped. “And everything. But especially her.” He kept staring at the picture like if he waited Amy would climb out of the photograph to meet him.  
That was the first time Jay had heard his friend acknowledge the situation they were in. For a minute Jay didn’t know what to say. He wanted to ask more— if Alex remembered anything past what he said, if he knew who this ‘totheark’ person was, if he knew what _the ark_ was, the first time he’d seen the thing and why he started running from it. But he didn’t. Instead, he swallowed a couple times against the sudden case of dry mouth despite the hot chocolate. When his throat cleared enough to speak he said, “I’ll help you.”  
That made Alex look up. “What?”  
“I’ll help you,” Jay said. “Find her.” He paused for a second. “That’s what you came up here to ask me, wasn’t it?”  
The other man was silent for a second. He looked down at the photo. “Yeah,” he said, still looking at printer-paper-Amy’s face. “Sure.”  
Jay waited for a ‘thank you’ of some kind until it became obvious he wasn’t getting one. “You’re welcome,” he muttered into his glass.  
  
The hot chocolate seemed to be actually calming him down a little. He’d heard somewhere that a warm glass of milk before you went to bed was to ease you into sleep. His own mom had never said that; she’d always made him and his sister avoid milk before bed because she thought it’d cause phlegm and make them sick. Jay shook his head to clear out the memory and took another drink to help the sudden ache in his chest. (Really it should be more alcoholic to help him deal with that.)  
Alex put down his own cup. “It’d be better with liquor,” he said offhand like he could read Jay’s mind or something creepy.  
Jay let out a snort that was almost a giggle and narrowly avoided hot chocolate up his nose. It’d been a long time since anyone had made him laugh even that much.  
Alex wasn’t smiling, really, but his mouth was less twisted than it had been.  
“Do you have any?”  
“No, sorry. I didn’t think to bring alcohol when I came up here.” Alex said dryly.  
Jay nodded and resumed staring into his drink.  
  
He had no idea what to talk about, so he decided to not talk about anything. He’d just finish his hot chocolate and let Alex expound on things at his will. That was a pretty good strategy with Alex, who liked talking into open air as much as he liked talking actually with a person… as far as Jay remembered, at least, that’s what Alex had been like. Granted his memory wasn’t in the best state since all this started, and Alex had changed a lot too.  
Apparently not that much though. As the quiet stretched on, Alex unwound at least enough to sit back in the chair instead of perching on the edge of the seat like he meant to bolt at the nearest opportunity. After five minutes (Jay checked the bright red numbers on the end-table’s clock almost as a nervous tic, at this point), Alex picked up the thread about Amy. He put the picture, which he’d still been holding, down on the end table where he could look at it without really moving his head, and explained more about the party they’d been at when he’d snapped it. From there he went on to pretty much the entirety of his and Amy’s relationship, as far as Jay could tell, starting from the second-last time Alex had seen her at her apartment and working back.  
Jay re-settled himself leaning against headboard of the hotel bed, staring off into space with his cocoa in his hands and letting his friend talk.  
  
Alex got up to when he and Amy had been in high school together before suddenly there came a loud thud from the room next door. They both looked up but Alex outright flinched, rising halfway off the chair as they looked toward the opposite wall. “What’s that?!”  
Jay had admittedly been drifting on the taste of the hot chocolate and the relentless drone of Alex’s voice. It’d been almost like sleep. Now he was jolted back into his current situation, and he felt his stomach sink and his muscles cramped from fear and worry again. He looked toward the wall, putting down his cup and rubbing his eyes with his other hand. “Uh. That’s… Jessica, I guess. That happens in her room sometimes, I don’t know what it is. She wouldn’t tell me… I don’t think she knows.”  
Alex had tensed up again at the sound, and now he had the same blank-angry look on his face that he had before Jay had told him he didn’t remember.  
He’d got like that the mention of Jessica, Jay thought, but why would Alex be that angry over a random girl in a hotel?  
“I have to go,” Alex said shortly. He’d already gotten his jacket on again and was carefully folding up Amy’s picture to put it back in the inside pocket.  
“Well, wait,” Jay said hurriedly, standing up too. Alex moved really fast when he felt like it, which left Jay scrambling to grab his hat and camera and key card from the dresser. He turned to the door to find that Alex had paused and was looking back at him with a frown. “I’ll come with you,” Jay explained as he stuffed his keycard in his pocket. “It’s not a good idea to go outside by yourself. Just, give me a second.”  
  
To his surprise Alex did wait. They went down to the parking lot together, though like before Alex didn’t say anything. He kept pushing at his glasses and pulling his sleeves down, but he didn’t keep his hands near his pockets like he had before.  
Outside Jay could actually feel the moment his paranoia prickled to life again. It was too cold out, too dark, too isolated, too wide open— even though as Alex had pointed out before it was just a parking lot. He took a second out by the cars to switch the camera’s night vision on. “Where’s your car?”  
“… I didn’t drive it here,” Alex called. Jay looked up to see the other man standing off by the sidewalk that let out around the hotel to the busy road by the front entrances. Orange light from a streetlamp about twenty feet behind him made his face totally featureless and his hair look like it was on fire.  
“What?” Jay was confused.  
“I’m gonna take the bus back,” Alex added loudly. He just kept standing there.  
Jay walked toward him, camera at eye level like usual, doing a few turns to the side only to find totally normal, dark hotel parking lot. “Uh, fine,” he said when he got close enough to speak in a normal level of voice. “Are you sure? I could drive you. It’s… kind of a ways to get to your place from here, isn’t it?” He realized as he said it that he had no idea where Alex lived. “I mean. It’s real late to take the bus, anyway.”  
“Jay, listen.” Alex’s face looked intense in the weird light. “Don’t upload this, alright?”  
Jay paused, and he actually put the camera down by his hip in his surprise. (It felt strange being outside with the paranoia and cool air creeping down his back without looking through the camera’s eye.) “Wait, what?” He asked. “You… you know I’ve been posting videos?”  
“It’s not exactly hard to figure out,” Alex said dryly. He shifted on his feet, looking toward the hotel and patting his pocket like he wasn’t sure it was still there. “Look, just promise me you won’t post any of this. I don’t need anyone knowing where I am right now.”  
“Anyone— you mean like those masked guys?” Jay raised the camera up to his eye again. “Do you know who—-”  
“No I don’t know them,” Alex snapped. “Do you promise or not?”  
“But why—”  
“Because we’re friends and I’m asking you too,” Alex said flatly. His tone didn’t really leave a place for argument.  
“What, are we, like, at a sleepover or something?”  
Alex shook his head and started walking away.  
Jay watched him go almost around the edge of the building before he broke. “Alex, wait.”  
The other man looked back at him.  
“Fine,” Jay said. “Look, I won’t post it. I promise,” he added. “Will you at least tell me what this is about?” He didn’t know if he meant Alex coming to visit him tonight or the whole situation.  
  
Alex paused for a moment. “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” he answered. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”  
“… alright.” Jay nodded, swallowing. This whole thing was bizarre, but, at least he wasn’t alone. Not out here anyway— once he got back to his hotel room he would be again. Maybe that was why he was reluctant to go inside. He stalled a little more, “Do you  _promise_ you’ll be back tomorrow?”  
“Go back inside, Jay,” Alex said, and he started walking away again. At the last minute before he disappeared around the corner he spun on his heel and waved to Jay. Like a little kid.  
  
Jay of course waved back, dropping his hand a fraction of a second after it was probably socially acceptable. “Right,” he said to himself as he did a 360* shot of the parking lot with his camera, just to be sure. The picture on the viewscreen was still clear and even. “Cool. Great.” Alex hadn’t actually answered any of his questions, but he would be coming back tomorrow.  
His breath was starting to mist the air so Jay went inside. He dropped onto his hotel bed fully clothed and put his head under the pillow, like squeezing his brain will make any of this make more sense.  
  
*  
  
Alex didn’t come back the next day.  
His cup was gone off of the end table by the chair when Jay woke up. There wasn’t even a condensation circle to mark where it’d sat. Jay looked for the cup fruitlessly for a minute or so and then gave up to go take a shower. When he tried calling Alex’s phone after he got out of the shower he didn’t even get a dial tone.  
  
He still didn’t post the video. (The tape turned out to be mostly useless anyway. Everything after Alex walking up to his room with him was over-exposed to the point of being blinded and the audio sounded like it’d been sung by flies.) He decided not to even make a vague tweet about the whole thing. It was stupid, really stupid, but Alex was his friend. And he had promised.  
  
Later, after Jessica, after the tapes from the safe, after running again and hiding again and having his world suddenly flipped over, he’ll be privately and selfishly glad he didn’t upload anything. Even after everything a lot of people who watch the entries still seem to be on his side, but them seeing him invite a cold-blooded murderer into his room and then _feed him cocoa_ might be something so bizarre that they’d finally stop forgiving him. And that would be something Jay couldn’t really deal with right then.  
Even if Alex being a murderer was his fault. Even if Jay didn’t deserve the viewers’ forgiveness anyway.  
  
//


End file.
